You will feel what a municipal pool actually is — a machine for belonging, disguised as chlorinated water — and you will grieve a building the way you grieve a person, and be surprised at yourself.
The Provenance Novels · Cover revealed
Shallow End
The pool closes in twelve weeks. Corrie has swum the 7 a.m. lane for fifty years. Neither fact is about swimming.
The municipal pool will close in twelve weeks. Its seven-a.m. regulars refuse to let it disappear quietly.
The story
What waits inside
They barely know one another beyond lane etiquette, borrowed goggles, and the rituals that make an ordinary Tuesday begin correctly.
Corrie has swum the same depth and the same stroke for fifty years. Ben takes minutes nobody requested. Fenna trains against a stopwatch. The Lane Three regulars know who arrives late, who cheats at turns, and which silences should not be disturbed.
When the council announces the pool's closure, their scrupulously polite campaign quickly escapes the changing room. Petitions multiply. Alliances form. Old rivalries surface. The building may be doomed, but nobody agrees on what exactly they are trying to save.
As the final morning approaches, the swimmers discover that a place can hold a community before its members have learned each other's stories, and that losing it may require them to become more than familiar strangers.
A wry, generous novel about civic life, unlikely friendship, and the places that teach us how to belong.
None — fully realist: one aging Dutch municipal pool, one closure decision made by decent people with a real budget, twelve weeks of notice, and the 7 a.m. regulars — the chloorclub — who have nodded to each other for decades and mostly don't know each other's surnames.
Third places don't make community by intention but by repetition. When the building goes, the repetition is the inheritance — and it can be re-housed by anyone brave enough to keep showing up somewhere colder.
Interior previews
First pages arriving soon
When manuscript pages are ready, they will appear here as a lightweight gallery — designed for fast loading, sharp type, and quiet immersion.